Google – Page 25

Google’s Pixel storage issue fix requires developer tools and a terminal

Google, Google Pixel, Tech / Kelly Newman / February 1, 2024

Stagefright’s revenge —

Automatic updates broke your phone; the fix is a highly technical manual process.

Ron Amadeo – Feb 1, 2024 8: 10 pm UTC

Google has another fix for the second major storage bug Pixel phones have seen in the last four months. Last week, reports surfaced that some Pixel owners were being locked out of their phone’s local storage, creating a nearly useless phone with all sorts of issues. Many blamed the January 2024 Google Play system update for the issue, and yesterday, Google confirmed that hypothesis. Google posted an official solution to the issue on the Pixel Community Forums, but there’s no user-friendly solution here. Google’s automatic update system broke people’s devices, but the fix is completely manual, requiring users to download the developer tools, install drivers, change settings, plug in their phones, and delete certain files via a command-line interface.

The good news is that, if you’ve left your phone sitting around in a nearly useless state for the last week or two, following the directions means you won’t actually lose any data. Having a week or two of downtime is not acceptable to a lot of people, though, and several users replied to the thread saying they had already wiped their device to get their phone working again and had to deal with the resulting data loss (despite many attempts and promises, Android does not have a comprehensive backup system that works).

The bad news is that I don’t think many normal users will be able to follow Google’s directions. First, you’ll need to perform the secret action to enable Android’s Developer Options (you tap on the build number seven times). Then, you have to download Google’s “SDK Platform-Tools” zip file, which is meant for app developers. After that, plug in your phone, switch to the correct “File transfer” connection mode, open a terminal, navigate to the platform-tools folder, and run both “./adb uninstall com.google.android.media.swcodec” and “./adb uninstall com.google.android.media.” Then reboot the phone and hope that works.

I skipped a few steps (please read Google’s instructions if you’re trying this), but that’s the basic gist of it. The tool Google is having people use is “ADB,” or the “Android Debug Bridge.” This is meant to give developers command-line access to their phones, which allows them to quickly push new app builds to the device, get a readout of system logs, and turn on special developer flags for various testing.

Google’s instructions will only work if everything goes smoothly, and as someone with hundreds of hours in ADB from testing various Android versions, I will guess that it will probably not go smoothly. On Windows, the ADB drivers often don’t install automatically. Instead, you’ll get “unknown device” or some other incorrect device detection, and you won’t be able to run any commands. You usually have to use the “let me pick from drivers on my computer” option, browse through your file system, and manually “select” (more like “guess”) the driver you need while clicking through various warnings. You can already see at least one user with driver issues in the thread, with Windows telling them, “Your device has malfunctioned,” when really it just needs a driver.

Google’s Pixel storage issue fix requires developer tools and a terminal Read More »

Google earnings: 100 million Google One subscribers, Google Cloud profits

Google, google cloud, google earnings, Tech / DJ Henderson / January 31, 2024

Do you have 6M Sunday Ticket subscribers yet? Probably not —

We highlight the interesting numbers from Google’s earnings call.

Ron Amadeo – Jan 31, 2024 7: 53 pm UTC

Alphabet’s earnings call was yesterday, and as usual, the company took in a lot of money ($86.31 billion), thanks mostly to ad click-through rates being at a certain level. More interesting, though, are the product numbers tucked away in the report.

For the good news, a big announcement was the success of one of Google’s biggest subscription plans, Google One, which CEO Sundar Pichai said is “just about to cross 100 million subscribers.” Google One is mostly a cloud-storage plan for Google accounts, allowing users to pay a monthly fee to get more than the 15GB of Drive and Gmail storage that comes free with a Google account. Pichai says the company’s whole subscription business—which is going to be Google One (storage), Google Workspace (business accounts), YouTube Premium (ad-free YouTube), and YouTube TV (a cable TV alternative)—are up to $5 billion in annual revenue. That’s up fivefold since 2019.

Speaking of subscriptions, one of Google’s most expensive, the $350-a-year NFL Sunday Ticket, didn’t have any hard numbers associated with it. Google SVP and CBO Philipp Schindler said the company was “pleased with the NFL Sunday Ticket signups in our first season.” Sunday Ticket was always a money-loser for DirecTV, and that was before the price shot up half a billion in the streaming era. Google is now reportedly on the hook to pay the NFL $2 billion a year for the next seven years. When asked about a return on investment for the project, Schindler only cited “solid” advertiser interest and that “NFL Sunday Ticket supports our long-term strategy and really helps solidify YouTube’s position as a must-have app on everyone’s TV set.”

The year 2023 was also the first time Google Cloud recorded a profit. Cloud is Google’s attempt to compete with Amazon Web Services as a platform for the cloud-based infrastructure needs of developers. After years of investment and growth, Cloud made $864 million in Q4 2023. It lost $186 million over the same period in 2022. According to a recent Canalys report, Google Cloud’s market share is in a distant third (10 percent) behind Microsoft Azure (25 percent) and the leader, AWS (31 percent).

For a while, Cloud’s third-place position could at least be offset by stronger growth than its competitors, but that Canalys report now has Microsoft with the highest growth rate, thanks to interest in its AI solutions. Microsoft is partnered with OpenAI, the creators of ChatGPT. Pichai spent a lot of time talking about Google Cloud’s competing AI work, but OpenAI has a level of hype and interest that can’t be matched by Google’s Bard/Gemini talk.

I don’t think we ever got a clear number for exactly how many people Google laid off in 2023. The company announced 12,000 layoffs in January, saying US employees had “already” been notified, while international employee layoffs would “take longer due to local laws and practices.” The company then laid off various employees across divisions throughout the year. Whatever the final cuts ended up being, the overall headcount only changed from 190,234 in December 2022 to 182,502 at the end of 2023, a net loss of about 8,000 people. Google was still hiring a lot during those layoffs.

One hundred eighty-two thousand employees is still a lot. Google’s headcount at the end of 2021 was 156,000 employees, and some Wall Street investors want to see the company return to that number. Pichai told employees to brace for more layoffs “throughout the year,” though the CEO says they wouldn’t be at the scale of 2023. Google’s downsizing cost a lot of money, with the company spending $2.1 billion on employee severance and $1.8 billion on office space exit charges for 2023.

Listing image by Getty Images | Alexander Koerner

Google earnings: 100 million Google One subscribers, Google Cloud profits Read More »

“Time to move on”: Fitbit owners fed up with battery problems, Google response

fitbit, Google, smartwatch, Tech / DJ Henderson / January 31, 2024

Enlarge / The Fitbit Charge 5 came out in September 2021.

Google

Fitbit owners are getting frustrated with Charge 5 fitness trackers quickly losing their charge and, in some cases, exhibiting additional problems. Google has denied that the problems are tied to firmware updates. But users remain skeptical, and some are fed up with Google’s limited response to a recurring problem.

Charge 5 battery complaints

On December 21, Fitbit announced Charge 5 firmware update 194.91 on its support forum. On paper, the update seemed typical, promising things like new clock faces, support for right-to-left text, and “bug fixes and improvements,” per the release notes.

But by early January, there were complaints on the forum from people who said they updated their Charge 5 and then saw their device’s battery suddenly drain much faster. Examples include one user claiming their battery life drains from 100 percent to 0 percent in 25 minutes and others saying their Charge 5 lasts about 12 hours. Most say their Charge 5 no longer lasts for a full day despite staying powered for days between charges before the update. The problems led a user going by Ge0ffh to call his device “completely unusable.”

A user named Disappointed01 said:

My Charge 5 (2yrs [sic] old) was working fine until I ran this update. Now I have to recharge it as least twice a day. Fully charged last night wore it for sleeping & flat when I awoke this morning. Have tried resetting … as per the advice on here. Has made no difference. Really disappointed as I love my Charge 5. I see a direct correlation between this battery issue and the update even though Fitbit reckon that’s not the case.

There are similar recollections and accusations against the firmware update on the support thread, which is 21 pages long as of this writing.

One user on the thread reported that they live in a household with three Charge 5s and that theirs is the only one with the latest firmware update and the only one experiencing problems.

Google denies firmware problem

The BBC was the first to report on concerns about the Charge 5’s latest firmware. Today, it reported that Google denied problems with the update.

“We’re still investigating this issue but can confirm it is not due to the recent firmware update,” a Google spokesperson told the BBC, which noted that Google’s rep “did not offer any alternative explanation.”

The Google spokesperson also advised users to keep updating their devices and to contact customer service if they have problems.

On the thread announcing the update, a Fitbit moderator has also advised users to contact Fitbit and conduct basic troubleshooting.

When I looked through the 21 pages of mostly complaints on the support thread, I saw a few people who reported that the firmware update did not result in Charge 5 problems.

But there are also numerous threads online (examples here, here, here, and here) demonstrating newfound frustration with the Charge 5.

“Time to move on”: Fitbit owners fed up with battery problems, Google response Read More »

The year of Windows on Arm? Google launches official Chrome builds.

chrome, Google, google chrome, Tech, windows on arm / DJ Henderson / January 26, 2024

Armed and ready —

Chrome for Windows-on-Arm should hit stable in time for Qualcomm’s big launch.

Ron Amadeo – Jan 26, 2024 5: 56 pm UTC

Enlarge / The Chrome nightly download page with an important section highlighted.

Ron Amadeo

Chrome is landing on a new platform: Windows on Arm. We don’t have an official announcement yet, but X user Pedro Justo was the first to spot that the Chrome Canary page now quietly hosts binaries for “Windows 11 Arm.”

Chrome has run on Windows for a long time, but that’s the x86 version. It also supports various Arm OSes, like Android, Chrome OS, and Mac OS. There’s also Chromium, the open source codebase on Chrome, which has run on Windows Arm for a while now, thanks mostly to Microsoft’s Edge browser being a Chromium derivative. The official “Google Chrome” has never been supported on Windows on Arm until now, though.

Windows may be a huge platform, but “Windows on Arm” is not. Apple’s switch to the Arm architecture has been a battery life revelation for laptops, and in the wake of that, interest in Windows on Arm has picked up. A big inflection point will be the release of laptops with the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite SoC in mid-2024. Assuming Qualcomm’s pre-launch hype pans out, this will be the first Arm on Windows chip to be in the same class as Apple Silicon. Previously, Windows on Arm could only run Chrome as an x86 app via a slow translation layer, so getting the world’s most popular browser to a native quality level in time for launch will be a big deal for Qualcomm.

The “Canary” channel is Chrome’s nightly builds channel, so fresh Arm builds should be arriving at a rapid pace. Usually, Canary features take about two months to hit the stable channels, which would be plenty of time for the new Snapdragon chip. It’s hard to know if Google will stick to that timeline, as this is a whole new architecture/OS combo. But again, most of the work has been ongoing for years now. The next steps would be rolling out Windows Arm dev and beta channels soon.

Listing image by Photo illustration by Aurich Lawson

The year of Windows on Arm? Google launches official Chrome builds. Read More »

The Pixel 8 Pro can now read body temps, if you swipe it across your face

Google, Google Pixel, google pixel 8 pro, Tech / DJ Henderson / January 25, 2024

Google, you know they make smartwatches, right? —

The phone needs a four-second forehead scan to read your temperature.

Ron Amadeo – Jan 25, 2024 7: 08 pm UTC

Step 1: get the phone as close to your face as possible.

Google
Step two: Over a period of four seconds, move the phone from the center of your forehead to your temple.

Google
Do all that correctly and you’ll get a body temperature reading.

Google

Most Pixel 8 Pro owners have probably forgotten that there’s an infrared temperature sensor on the back of the phone next to the LED camera flash. But it’s still there, and almost four months after launch, it’s getting a new feature: body temperature measurement. The four-month hold-up is because body temperature sensors are regulated as medical devices, so Google needed FDA approval to enable the feature. The company has a blog post detailing the feature, which says: “In clinical trials, our software algorithm was able to calculate body temperature in the range of 96.9°F–104°F (36.1°C–40°C) to within ±0.3°C when compared with an FDA-cleared temporal artery thermometer. In layman’s terms, this means the Pixel body temperature feature is about as accurate as other temporal artery thermometers.” The feature only works in the US.

Like everything about the Pixel 8 Pro’s temperature sensor, the basic feature idea sounds fine (if not several years late), but the execution leaves much to be desired. Google has a support page detailing how to use the body temperature sensor, and you’ll need to slowly swipe the phone across your entire face over four seconds to get a reading. The sensor needs to be extremely close to your face to work; Google says it wants the phone “as close as possible to the skin without touching.” If you wear glasses, you’ll need to take them off, because the phone needs to be so close to your face it will hit them. If you manage all that, you’ll get a body temperature reading that you can save to your Fitbit profile.

We found the temperature sensor to be the biggest negative mark in our Pixel 8 Pro review. I’m not entirely sure a well-executed temperature sensor would be a useful feature on a phone, but the Pixel 8’s temperature sensor is just such a hassle to use. Besides forehead measuring, it can also check the temperature of objects, but it only has a range of two inches. There’s also no camera feed or any targeting system to be sure of what you’re measuring—you get a blank screen with a “measure” button, you press it, and a number appears. Temperature sensing also stops the instant it reads any single temperature—it’s not continuous. All the user experience problems made the temperature sensor instantly forgettable. The body temperature addition isn’t helping and feels like a feature that would be better suited for a smartwatch.

The feature is rolling out as part of the January 2024 Pixel update (this isn’t the Google Play update that’s bricking phone storage. That’s a different update!). It also includes the “Circle to Search” feature that was announced during the Galaxy S24 launch, and AI-powered “Magic compose” for the Google Messages app. Google says the features will roll out “over the next few weeks.”

The Pixel 8 Pro can now read body temps, if you swipe it across your face Read More »

Google’s latest AI video generator can render cute animals in implausible situations

AI, Biz & IT, Google, image synthesis, Lumiere, machine learning, text-to-video, text2video, video synthesis / Mike M. / January 24, 2024

An elephant with a party hat—underwater —

Lumiere generates five-second videos that “portray realistic, diverse and coherent motion.”

Benj Edwards – Jan 24, 2024 10: 45 pm UTC

Enlarge / Still images of AI-generated video examples provided by Google for its Lumiere video synthesis model.

On Tuesday, Google announced Lumiere, an AI video generator that it calls “a space-time diffusion model for realistic video generation” in the accompanying preprint paper. But let’s not kid ourselves: It does a great job at creating videos of cute animals in ridiculous scenarios, such as using roller skates, driving a car, or playing a piano. Sure, it can do more, but it is perhaps the most advanced text-to-animal AI video generator yet demonstrated.

According to Google, Lumiere utilizes unique architecture to generate a video’s entire temporal duration in one go. Or, as the company put it, “We introduce a Space-Time U-Net architecture that generates the entire temporal duration of the video at once, through a single pass in the model. This is in contrast to existing video models which synthesize distant keyframes followed by temporal super-resolution—an approach that inherently makes global temporal consistency difficult to achieve.”

In layperson terms, Google’s tech is designed to handle both the space (where things are in the video) and time (how things move and change throughout the video) aspects simultaneously. So, instead of making a video by putting together many small parts or frames, it can create the entire video, from start to finish, in one smooth process.

The official promotional video accompanying the paper “Lumiere: A Space-Time Diffusion Model for Video Generation,” released by Google.

Lumiere can also do plenty of party tricks, which are laid out quite well with examples on Google’s demo page. For example, it can perform text-to-video generation (turning a written prompt into a video), convert still images into videos, generate videos in specific styles using a reference image, apply consistent video editing using text-based prompts, create cinemagraphs by animating specific regions of an image, and offer video inpainting capabilities (for example, it can change the type of dress a person is wearing).

In the Lumiere research paper, the Google researchers state that the AI model outputs five-second long 1024×1024 pixel videos, which they describe as “low-resolution.” Despite those limitations, the researchers performed a user study and claim that Lumiere’s outputs were preferred over existing AI video synthesis models.

As for training data, Google doesn’t say where it got the videos they fed into Lumiere, writing, “We train our T2V [text to video] model on a dataset containing 30M videos along with their text caption. [sic] The videos are 80 frames long at 16 fps (5 seconds). The base model is trained at 128×128.”

Enlarge / A block diagram showing components of the Lumiere AI model, provided by Google.

AI-generated video is still in a primitive state, but it’s been progressing in quality over the past two years. In October 2022, we covered Google’s first publicly unveiled image synthesis model, Imagen Video. It could generate short 1280×768 video clips from a written prompt at 24 frames per second, but the results weren’t always coherent. Before that, Meta debuted its AI video generator, Make-A-Video. In June of last year, Runway’s Gen2 video synthesis model enabled the creation of two-second video clips from text prompts, fueling the creation of surrealistic parody commercials. And in November, we covered Stable Video Diffusion, which can generate short clips from still images.

AI companies often demonstrate video generators with cute animals because generating coherent, non-deformed humans is currently difficult—especially since we, as humans (you are human, right?), are adept at noticing any flaws in human bodies or how they move. Just look at AI-generated Will Smith eating spaghetti.

Judging by Google’s examples (and not having used it ourselves), Lumiere appears to surpass these other AI video generation models. But since Google tends to keep its AI research models close to its chest, we’re not sure when, if ever, the public may have a chance to try it for themselves.

As always, whenever we see text-to-video synthesis models getting more capable, we can’t help but think of the future implications for our Internet-connected society, which is centered around sharing media artifacts—and the general presumption that “realistic” video typically represents real objects in real situations captured by a camera. Future video synthesis tools more capable than Lumiere will make deceptive deepfakes trivially easy to create.

To that end, in the “Societal Impact” section of the Lumiere paper, the researchers write, “Our primary goal in this work is to enable novice users to generate visual content in an creative and flexible way. [sic] However, there is a risk of misuse for creating fake or harmful content with our technology, and we believe that it is crucial to develop and apply tools for detecting biases and malicious use cases in order to ensure a safe and fair use.”

Google’s latest AI video generator can render cute animals in implausible situations Read More »

Pixel phones are broken again with critical storage permission bug

bugs, Google, Tech / Mike M. / January 24, 2024

Did Google lay off all their bug testers? —

Users say they can’t access their device storage after January 2024 update.

Ron Amadeo – Jan 24, 2024 10: 26 pm UTC

It’s almost hard to believe this is happening again, but Pixel users are reporting that an OS update has locked them out of their phones’ internal storage, causing app crashes, non-functional phones, and a real possibility of data loss. Over in the Google Pixel subreddit, user “Liv-Lyf” compiled a dozen posts that complain of an “internal storage access issue” and blame the January 2024 Google Play system update.

In October, Pixel phones faced a nightmare storage bug that caused bootlooping, inaccessible devices, and data loss. The recent post says, “The symptoms are all the same” as that October bug, with “internal storage not getting mounted, camera crashes, Files app shows no files, screenshots not getting saved, internal storage shows up empty in ADB Shell, etc.” When asked for a comment, Google told Ars, “We’re aware of this issue and are looking into it,” and a Google rep posted effectively the same statement in the comments.

In the October bug, users were locked out of their system storage due to a strange permissions issue. Having a phone try to run without any user access to your own storage is a mess. It breaks the camera and screenshots because you can’t write media. File Managers read “0 bytes” for every file and folder. Nothing works over USB, and some phones, understandably, just fail to boot. The issue in October arrived as part of the initial Android 14 release and only affected devices that had multiple users set up.

Picking through the posts, it’s unclear if there’s a certain type of user that should be more wary of the January 2024 Google Play update. Some users say they haven’t enabled the multiple-user functionality, but several mention having a work profile enabled. Work Profiles aren’t quite “multiple users,” but the system leverages a lot of multi-user features to let users have duplicate “personal” and “work” copies of the same apps. Many users don’t say if they have a work profile or not.

The “January 2024 Google Play system update” isn’t the usual OTA system update but is a Project Mainline or APEX module. These take core system components and wrap them up into easily distributable packaging where they can be delivered via the Play Store, much like an app, but with way more permissions (only Google can make Play system updates). Google posts release notes for Play system updates, and there’s nothing in the January 2024 update that jumps out as the potential cause of a storage access problem. You can check your current version on a Pixel phone by going to Settings, Security & Privacy, then “System & updates.” At the bottom, you’ll see a month and year for your “Google Play system update” level. DO NOT tap on this section because that will bring up the update screen.

Google’s “we’re looking into it” statement doesn’t give users much guidance on how they should deal with this in the meantime. A good first step, at any time, is to ensure you have backups of all your important phone data. Obviously, avoiding the January 2024 Google Play system update is recommended for now, but I don’t think there’s a way for users to do that. Google Play system updates don’t offer users any controls, so you’re mostly hoping an automatic update doesn’t brick your phone. The good news is that the Google Play system often fails to check for updates. They get installed on reboot, so try not to power cycle your phone. Disabling a work profile and any other multi-user features sounds like a good idea if you can manage that. There are instructions here.

Pixel phones are broken again with critical storage permission bug Read More »

Google lays off “dozens” from X Labs, wants projects to seek outside funding

Google, google x, layoffs, Tech / Kelly Newman / January 22, 2024

At least you don’t have to work on a Monday —

Google wants projects to take outside venture capital as part of budget cuts.

Ron Amadeo – Jan 22, 2024 9: 25 pm UTC

A large Google sign seen on a window of Google's headquarters. — Enlarge / Exterior view of a Googleplex building, the corporate headquarters of Google and parent company Alphabet, May 2018.

Google/Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai wasn’t kidding when, earlier this month, he said more layoffs are coming. The latest group to be hit is Alphabet’s X Lab, which is losing “dozens of employees,” according to a new report from Bloomberg. This is something like the 11th Google layoff announcement we’ve covered in the past 12 months and the fourth one this month.

The X Lab is Alphabet’s “moonshot” experimental group, which is responsible for wild concepts like a wearable head-up display, a self-driving car, smart contact lenses, flying Internet balloons, and delivery drones. This is the age of Google cost-cutting, and you’ll notice none of those projects is a rip-roaring commercial success. On Google’s financials, the X Lab is part of Alphabet’s “Other Bets” group, which burns through around a billion dollars every quarter. It’s a research arm, so the hope is that spending all this money will someday lead to new revenue streams. For the short-term Wall Street types, though, it’s a money loser, quarter to quarter, and that makes it a prime candidate for cuts.

Bloomberg has a copy of the memo announcing the cuts to the X Labs staff, and there’s more in there than just layoffs. X Lab CEO Astro Teller writes: “We’re expanding our approach to focus on spinning out more projects as independent companies funded through market-based capital. We’ll do this by opening our scope to collaborate with a broader base of industry and financial partners, and by continuing to emphasize lean teams and capital efficiency.” Basically, Google wants these money losers to find their own funding somewhere else, at least partially.

The “outside funding” model isn’t new for some of Alphabet’s biggest and most promising “Other Bets” projects. The self-driving car company, Waymo, took rounds of outside funding in 2020 and 2021, racking up over $5 billion of cash that didn’t come from the Google Ads money geyser. Verily, Alphabet’s health care data analytics company, has also raised billions in outside funding. Both groups started as X projects and later “graduated” to full-fledged Alphabet companies. Others, like Project Loon (Internet balloons) and Sidewalk Infrastructure Partners (infrastructure planning), were X or Alphabet companies and were spun out as fully independent entities, separate from the Alphabet earnings sheet. Apparently, Alphabet wants to push X projects down one of those two paths.

On one hand, outside funding will result in a tougher, more critical eye for some of these projects. On the other hand, the Bloomberg report notes that “Alphabet could only accommodate so many Other Bets, creating a bottleneck for X ventures that were ready to take the next step, according to one of the people with knowledge of the matter. Startups within X often faced a choice between waiting for a spot to open up or striking out on their own.”

Google lays off “dozens” from X Labs, wants projects to seek outside funding Read More »

Google search is losing the fight with SEO spam, study says

Google, google search, spam, Tech / Kelly Newman / January 19, 2024

Just wait until more AI sites arrive —

Study finds “search engines seem to lose the cat-and-mouse game that is SEO spam.”

Ron Amadeo – Jan 19, 2024 6: 51 pm UTC

It’s not just you—Google Search is getting worse. A new study from Leipzig University, Bauhaus-University Weimar, and the Center for Scalable Data Analytics and Artificial Intelligence looked at Google search quality for a year and found the company is losing the war against SEO (Search Engine Optimization) spam.

The study, first spotted by 404media, “monitored Google, Bing and DuckDuckGo for a year on 7,392 product review queries,” using queries like “best headphones” to study search results. The focus was on product review queries because the researchers felt those searches were “particularly vulnerable to affiliate marketing due to its inherent conflict of interest between users, search providers, and content providers.”

Overall, the study found that “the majority of high-ranking product reviews in the result pages of commercial search engines (SERPs) use affiliate marketing, and significant amounts are outright SEO product review spam.” Search engines occasionally update their ranking algorithms to try to combat spam, but the study found that “search engines seem to lose the cat-and-mouse game that is SEO spam” and that there are “strong correlations between search engine rankings and affiliate marketing, as well as a trend toward simplified, repetitive, and potentially AI-generated content.”

The study found “an inverse relationship between a page’s optimization level and its perceived expertise, indicating that SEO may hurt at least subjective page quality.” Google and its treatment of pages is the primary force behind what does and doesn’t count as SEO, and to say Google’s guidelines reduce subjective page quality is a strike against Google’s entire ranking algorithm.

The bad news is that it doesn’t seem like this will get better any time soon. The study points out generative AI sites one or two times, but that was only in the past year. The elephant in the room is that generative AI is starting to be able to completely automate the processes of SEO spam. Some AI content farms can scan a human-written site, use it for “training data,” rewrite it slightly, and then stave off the actual humans with more aggressive SEO tactics. There are already people bragging about doing AI-powered “SEO heists” on X (formerly Twitter). The New York Times is taking OpenAI to court for copyright infringement, and a class-action suit for book publishers calls ChatGPT and LLaMA (Large Language Model Meta AI) “industrial-strength plagiarists.” Artists are in the same boat from tools like Midjourney and Stable Diffusion. Most websites do not have the legal capacity to take on an infinite wave of automated spam sites enabled by these tools. Google’s policy is to not penalize AI-generated content in its search results.

A Google spokesperson responded to the study by pointing out that Google is still doing better than its competition: “This particular study looked narrowly at product review content, and it doesn’t reflect the overall quality and helpfulness of Search for the billions of queries we see every day. We’ve launched specific improvements to address these issues – and the study itself points out that Google has improved over the past year and is performing better than other search engines. More broadly, numerous third parties have measured search engine results for other types of queries and found Google to be of significantly higher quality than the rest.”

This post was updated at 6: 00PM ET to add a statement from Google.

Google search is losing the fight with SEO spam, study says Read More »

Bing Search shows few, if any, signs of market share increase from AI features

AI, Bing, Bing Chat, chatgpt, copilot, Google, microsoft, Windows 11, windows copilot / DJ Henderson / January 18, 2024

high hopes —

Bing’s US and worldwide market share is about the same as it has been for years.

Andrew Cunningham – Jan 18, 2024 9: 52 pm UTC

Not quite one year ago, Microsoft announced a “multi-year, multi-billion dollar investment” in OpenAI, a company that had made waves in 2022 with its ChatGPT chatbot and DALL-E image creator. The next month, Microsoft announced that it was integrating a generative AI chatbot into its Bing search engine and Edge browser, and similar generative AI features were announced for Windows in the apps formerly known as Microsoft Office, Microsoft Teams, and other products.

Adding AI features to Bing was meant to give it an edge over Google, and reports indicated that Google was worried enough about it to accelerate its own internal generative AI efforts. Microsoft announced in March 2023 that Bing surpassed the 100 million monthly active users mark based on interest in Bing Chat and its ilk; by Microsoft’s estimates, each percentage of Google’s search market share that Bing could siphon away was worth as much as $2 billion to Microsoft.

A year later, it looks like Microsoft’s AI efforts may have helped Bing on the margins, but they haven’t meaningfully eroded Google’s search market share, according to Bloomberg. Per Bloomberg’s analysis of data from Sensor Tower, Bing usage had been down around 33 percent year over year just before the AI-powered features were added, but those numbers had rebounded by the middle of 2023.

Microsoft hasn’t given an official update on Bing’s monthly active users in quite a while—we’ve asked the company for an update, and will share it if we get one—though Microsoft Chief Marketing Officer Yusuf Medhi told Bloomberg that “millions and millions of people” were still using the new AI features.

StatCounter data mostly tells a similar story. According to its data, Google’s worldwide market share is currently in the low 90s, and it has been for virtually the entire 15-year period for which StatCounter offers data. Bing’s worldwide market share number over the same period has been remarkably stable; it was about 3.5 percent in the summer of 2009, when what had been known as Live Search was renamed Bing in the first place, and as of December 2023, it was still stuck at around 3.4 percent.

Recent US data is slightly more flattering for Microsoft, where Bing’s usage rose from 6.7 percent in December 2022 to 7.7 percent in December 2023. But that doesn’t necessarily suggest any kind of AI-fueled influx in new Bing search users—usage remained in the mid-to-high 6 percent range through most of 2023 before ticking up right at the end of the year—and Bing’s US usage has floated in that same 6–7 percent zone for most of the last decade.

It even seems like Microsoft is making moves to distance its AI efforts from Bing a bit. What began as “Bing Chat” or “the new Bing” is now known as Windows Copilot—both inside Windows 11 and elsewhere. Earlier this week, the Bing Image Creator became “Image Creator from Designer.” Both products still feature Bing branding prominently—the Copilot screen in Windows 11 still says “with Bing” at the top of it, and the Image Creator tool is still hosted on the Bing.com domain. But if these new AI features aren’t driving Bing’s market share up, then it makes sense for Microsoft to create room for them to stand on their own.

That’s not to say Google’s search dominance is assured. Leipzig University researchers published a study earlier this week (PDF) suggesting Google, Bing, and the Bing-powered DuckDuckGo had seen “an overall downward trend in text quality,” especially for heavily SEO-optimized categories like purchase recommendations and product reviews.

Bing Search shows few, if any, signs of market share increase from AI features Read More »

Google lays off 100 at YouTube; CEO says more layoffs are coming

Google, layoffs, Sundar Pichai / DJ Henderson / January 18, 2024

Layoffs will continue until morale improves —

Sundar Pichai tells employees to brace for “tough choices… throughout the year.”

Ron Amadeo – Jan 18, 2024 7: 25 pm UTC

Enlarge / Google is looking pretty dilapidated these days.

Aurich Lawson

Today’s Google layoff announcement concerns YouTube, which plans to lay off 100 employees. Tubefilter was the first to report the news. This is the third Google layoff announcement in eight days (the other two were at Google Assistant/Hardware and Google Ads) and the 10th Google layoff announcement we’ve covered in the past 12 months. It feels like we could be doing this kind of reporting via a template by now.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai says to expect more layoffs. The Verge got hold of an internal memo from Pichai to Google’s remaining employees on January 10, telling them to brace for “tough choices” in the future and that “to be upfront, some teams will continue to make specific resource allocation decisions throughout the year where needed, and some roles may be impacted.” Last year Google cut 12,000 jobs in January and continued to make smaller additional cuts all year. Pichai told his employees that this year, “these role eliminations are not at the scale of last year’s reductions, and will not touch every team.”

The January 10 date of the memo means Googlers got a heads up about the Google Assistant, Hardware, Google Ads, and YouTube layoffs, but no one knows when the layoffs will stop. Making investors happy is a big factor in all these layoffs, so if you’re interested in the Wall Street perspective on Google’s headcount, back in March 2023, activist investor Christopher Hohn of TCI Fund Management wanted to see Pichai cut another 25,000 people after the 12,000 original layoffs. Hohn wants to see Alphabet/Google go back to 150,000 employees, which was the company headcount at the end of 2021.

Even after what seemed like an endless amount of layoff announcements last year, as of Q3 2023, Alphabet’s headcount was still at 182,381. Even though the company laid off over 12,000 people, it was still hiring people during that time, so year over year, Alphabet’s headcount only dropped by 4,400 people.

For years, one of Google’s big advantages was being a great workplace, with endless employee perks, 20 percent time to work on pet projects, and whimsical offices. Budget cutbacks and another year of looming layoffs will put a serious dent in the already awful morale at the company. Back when founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin introduced Google to Wall Street in an IPO founders letter, the two said: “Our employees, who have named themselves Googlers, are everything.” Page and Brin are no longer in charge, though, and the company has changed significantly since then.

Google lays off 100 at YouTube; CEO says more layoffs are coming Read More »

Climate denialists find new ways to monetize disinformation on YouTube

climate change, climate denial, climate denialism, Google, online advertising, Policy, youtube / Mike M. / January 16, 2024

Content creators have spent the past five years developing new tactics to evade YouTube’s policies blocking monetization of videos making false claims about climate change, a report from a nonprofit advocacy group, the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), warned Tuesday.

What the CCDH found is that content creators who could no longer monetize videos spreading “old” forms of climate denial—including claims that “global warming is not happening” or “human-generated greenhouse gasses are not causing global warming”—have moved on.

Now they’re increasingly pushing other claims that contradict climate science, which YouTube has not yet banned and may not ever ban. These include harmful claims that “impacts of global warming are beneficial or harmless,” “climate solutions won’t work,” and “climate science and the climate movement are unreliable.”

The CCDH uncovered these new climate-denial tactics by using artificial intelligence to scan transcripts of 12,058 videos posted on 96 YouTube channels that the CCDH found had previously posted climate-denial content. Verified by researchers, the AI model used was judged accurate in labeling climate-denial content approximately 78 percent of the time.

According to the CCDH’s analysis, the amount of content disputing climate solutions, climate science, and impacts of climate change today comprises 70 percent of climate-denial content—a percent that doubled from 2018 to 2023. At the same time, the amount of content pushing old climate-denial claims that are harder or impossible to monetize fell from 65 percent in 2018 to 30 percent in 2023.

These “new forms of climate denial,” the CCDH warned, are designed to delay climate action by spreading disinformation.

“A new front has opened up in this battle,” Imran Ahmed, the CCDH’s chief executive, said on a call with reporters, according to Reuters. “The people that we’ve been looking at, they’ve gone from saying climate change isn’t happening to now saying, ‘Hey, climate change is happening, but there is no hope. There are no solutions.'”

Since 2018—based on “estimates of typical ad pricing on YouTube” by social media analytics tool Social Blade—YouTube may have profited by as much as $13.4 million annually from videos flagged by the CCDH. And YouTube confirmed that some of these videos featured climate denialism that YouTube already explicitly bans.

In response to the CCDH’s report, YouTube de-monetized some videos found to be in violation of its climate change policy. But a spokesperson confirmed to Ars that the majority of videos that the CCDH found were considered compliant with YouTube’s ad policies.

The fact that most of these videos remain compliant is precisely why the CCDH is calling on YouTube to update its policies, though.

Currently, YouTube’s policy prohibits monetization of content “that contradicts well-established scientific consensus around the existence and causes of climate change.”

“Our climate change policy prohibits ads from running on content that contradicts well-established scientific consensus around the existence and causes of climate change,” YouTube’s spokesperson told Ars. “Debate or discussions of climate change topics, including around public policy or research, is allowed. However, when content crosses the line to climate change denial, we stop showing ads on those videos. We also display information panels under relevant videos to provide additional information on climate change and context from third parties.”

The CCDH worries that YouTube standing by its current policy is too short-sighted. The group recommended tweaking the policy to instead specify that YouTube prohibits content “that contradicts the authoritative scientific consensus on the causes, impacts, and solutions to climate change.”

If YouTube and other social media platforms don’t acknowledge new forms of climate denial and “urgently” update their disinformation policies in response, these new attacks on climate change science “will only increase,” the CCDH warned.

“It is vital that those advocating for action to avert climate disaster take note of this substantial shift from denial of anthropogenic climate change to undermining trust in both solutions and science itself, and shift our focus, our resources and our counternarratives accordingly,” the CCDH’s report said, adding that “demonetizing climate-denial” content “removes the economic incentives underpinning its creation and protects advertisers from bankrolling harmful content.”

Climate denialists find new ways to monetize disinformation on YouTube Read More »